The copy I'm reading calls itself the 'corrected version'. What does the uncorrected version look like, and how could you tell? Did he accidentally write an early version that had made basic syntactic sense and had a conventional narrative?

I'm imagining Joyce furiously writing to his publisher after receiving a copy of the first edition: "You imbeciles! Didn't you spot the misspelling of 'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenth' on the very first page?!"

Joyce's stuff is notorious for misprints, bootleg versions and so on. Scholars argue over spelling mistakes, punctuation and all sorts in both the original and 'corrected' texts so it's just some academic's take on how it should be presented. I doubt anyone outside that world would be able to tell the difference without someone pointing it out. People argue over stuff like where the full stops should be in certain sentences in Ulysses.

It appears that the famous telegram from Simon Dedalus to Stephen did not read when delivered to him in Paris, ''Mother dying come home father,'' but ''Nother dying come home father.'' Hence it was, as Stephen recalls, a ''curiosity to show.'' The typesetters could not believe their eyes in this instance, nor in another when the black horn fan held by the ''whoremistress'' Bella Cohen asks, ''Have you forgotten me?'' and is answered, ''Nes. Yo.'' They changed it to ''Yes. No.''

If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.Joyce's reply for a request for a plan of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann

and is also
doer and done, actor and act at once. un and ur (zero and one)
but what i've just noticed is the porter doesn't just refer to the famous pint of porter please but
also to the porter in Macbeth and the knock, knock occurs right at the end of this thunder
(while also giving a nod to k-punk)

Knocking within. Enter a Porter

Porter

Here's a knocking indeed! If a
man were porter of hell-gate, he should have
old turning the key.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of
Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged
himself on the expectation of plenty: come in
time; have napkins enow about you; here
you'll sweat for't.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock! Who's there, in the other devil's
name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an
English tailor come hither, for stealing out of
a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
roast your goose.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock; never at quiet! What are you? But
this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter
it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire.

Knocking within
Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter.

Opens the gate

here is the confirmation for the macbeth reference a few pages beforehand

Joyce's stuff is notorious for misprints, bootleg versions and so on. Scholars argue over spelling mistakes, punctuation and all sorts in both the original and 'corrected' texts so it's just some academic's take on how it should be presented. I doubt anyone outside that world would be able to tell the difference without someone pointing it out. People argue over stuff like where the full stops should be in certain sentences in Ulysses.

I can imagine that for the sort of person who gets obsessed with things like this, each of his books is like the Qu'ran and ceases to be the original text, with its integral magickal potency, if so much as a single letter is out of place.

In case you haven't read it yet, there has been an entertaining long-read in the NYTimes about John Kidd: an academic once famed as the greatest Joyce scholar ever, who started talking to birds and then disappeared. I am fond of people able to lose their minds about the correct punctuation of two periods in a book hundreds of pages long.

The Following User Says Thank You to m99188868 For This Useful Post:

i was just having a chat with the grapejuice guy about leap years in the wake.
joyce was born in febuary on a leap year and they have some kind of special significance
for him (http://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogsp...ity-too-1.html
432 was also a leap year)
but my suspicion is that leap years appeal to him because they point to the basic inadequacy and arbitrariness of numerical systems and divisions. that all the numbers in the wake, all the numerical mysticism of 1s and 0s, 2s, 4s and 12s, of 108 and 432 is being sent up. useful as structuring devices but failing to account for reality. the blueprint maybe mathematical but in practice there is always a slight deviation, an imbalance, and it is that very deviation and imbalance that history emerges from.

heronboneMay 9, 2016 at 11:10 AM

Something quite extraordinary just happened and it ended with 432, which was also, as puck would have it, a leap year

(2016 was a leap year.)

What forces combined and clashing? And in what ratio?
What hodgepodge system of imbalanced and misaligned energies toppling into future? And what could nudge the Whole into harmony?

essential reading. pertains especially to the ondt and the gracehopper. lewis gets cast as one of the sets of twins with joyce being the other half of the dyad.

.

I have said to myself that I will fix my attention upon those things that
have most meaning for me. All that seems to me to contradict or threaten
those things I will do my best to modify or to defeat, and whatever I see
that favours and agrees with those things I will support and do my best
to strengthen. In consequence, I shall certainly be guilty of injustice, the
heraclitean ‘injustice of the opposites.’ But how can we evade our destiny of
being ‘an opposite,’ except by becoming some grey mixture, that is in reality
just nothing at all?